After checking for oncoming headlights, and ascertaining that his odds of making it through the intersection without being t-boned were better than a coin toss, he passed under the hovering traffic lights and pulled into the Shell station.
A 1987 Monte Carlo, black with thin gold accents above the wheels and along the sides, idled beside the ice machine. The single blue dome on the roof, just above its driver’s side window, suggested this was Chief Beckett’s car.
The man himself, trim and tall, leaned against his car, legs crossed at the ankles, deep in conversation with a young, female station attendant. He was in his late fifties Evan thought, and wore heavy boots, dark blue jeans, and a uniform shirt pressed to the point of crispiness. Evan guessed he used glue rather than starch to hold those creases against this humidity. A hint of closely cut silver hair showed beneath his hat.
Evan parked next to the Monte Carlo and got out of his car. The attendant held a Styrofoam cup of coffee in her hands. As Evan drew closer, he saw she wasn’t half as young as she was trying to be, though the bleached blond mass of curls had been fairly convincing.
She lounged against the Monte Carlo, a bit more casually than the chief, batting her eyelids so emphatically that Evan feared she’d wear a hole through her corneas. The smile playing on her lips was rehearsed to near perfection, but it dropped away the second her eyes fell on Evan. Evan wasn’t sure if it was interest he saw in her eyes or just curiosity. He was used to both, and cared about neither.
“Looks like your boy made it,” the woman said to Beckett. She perused Evan from his face to his shoes and back again, then popped her gum and rolled her eyes back to the chief. “Here you go, Beck,” she sighed, sliding the coffee across the roof of his car. “Swing by later when it’s just you. Maybe I’ll have some pie or somethin’ for ya.”
She headed toward the front door of the station, her hips twitching like a compass between two magnets.
“Thanks, Billie,” Beckett said. “I’ll see what I can do,”
“Well, don’t break your neck on my account,” she called over her shoulder. Bells jangled as she pushed through the door into the station.
Beckett had been admiring the view as she walked away. After the door closed he turned to Evan. “I’m Nathan Beckett, Wewa Chief of Police. You must be the Brevard County boy they hired over at the Sheriff’s Office.”
“Evan Caldwell,” Evan said, holding out a hand. “Practically a man.”
The humor Beckett had faked in his banter with Billie now twinkled somewhat more authentically in his eyes. “You don’t say,” he said as he shook Evan’s hand. He squinted just a bit, as if taking his measure over again. “Looks like your new boss finally pissed off the wrong bad guy. Couple ol’ boys found your sheriff shot dead in his truck a few of miles from here.”
“Sheriff Hutchins?” Evan asked.
“Yep.”
Fog hung over and around them like a wet, gray tent. Beyond the glow of the station’s fluorescents, Evan heard a couple of vehicles zipping past and wondered if they were on their way to the scene. Above, the bright red HELL still blazed, the burnt-out “S” now visible in silhouette against the slowly brightening sky.
“We haven’t had a law enforcement officer murdered here in over twenty years,” Beckett said. This is going to be one hell of a mess.” He clapped Evan on the shoulder. “Glad this ain’t my jurisdiction.”
“Chief,” Evan said, meeting the older man’s eyes, “I hope it won’t hurt your feelings if I tell you I feel the same way.”
Beckett’s smile vanished, or blinked, rather. It was gone and then back again in an instant, but the new smile was more in his teeth and less in his eyes. “Don’t worry, son. I recover quick enough.”
Evan frowned down at his shoes, now covered in condensation from the fog. He wondered, not for the first time, why he even bothered polishing the things. He let out a slow breath as he looked back up at Beckett. “So, are we about to embark on some kind of country boy/city boy conflict that I should prepare for?”
Beckett’s mouth twitched with the ghost of a grin. “I couldn’t care less where you’re from, Caldwell,” he said.
“So what’s the problem?”
Beckett sighed and glanced at the sound of a passing car before he answered. “Let me explain it this way: about four years ago, one of my officers and I came across a human hand over not too far from where we’re headed this morning. Right on the jurisdictional line.” He paused to take a sip of his coffee, then winced as he swallowed. Apparently, the coffee wasn’t what Beckett came there for. “I call the ME, and he tells me I have to call the Sheriff’s Office to have them verify what we found before he can come out. So I wait in the hot sun and a cloud of love bugs for a full hour until the Sheriff comes out, looks at the damn thing, and confirms for me that it’s a human hand. On account of I might have confused it with something else that has thumbs. Then we were allowed to call the M.E. so that he could take the hand away and I could take my happy ass on home.”
Beckett tossed the undrunk coffee into the trash can by the pump and opened the door of the Monte Carlo.
“Y’all are as bad as the Feds, is what I’m saying,” he added.
“Well, I’ll try not to insult you unnecessarily,” Evan said simply.
“Alrighty then, Big Time. How would you like to proceed?”
“I guess you’d better take me to the body.”
“Well I guess I’d better,” Beckett said, climbing into his vehicle. “I was going to offer you a ride, but I think maybe you ought to take your own car. I don’t plan on lingering. Although, if you’re gonna be working much back in here, you might want to trade that Pilot in for something a little less Japanese.”
“Thanks for the suggestion,” Evan said with a tight smile. “I’ll try not to keep you too long at the scene.”
Beckett cranked the engine on the Monte Carlo. It roared to life, the aftermarket exhaust amplifying rather than muffling. He rolled down his window. “You’re fine,” he said. “I’ll just stay long enough to take some notes on how it’s done.”
THREE
COUNTY ROAD 22 CUT arrow-straight through the pines and scrub brush, with an occasional ranch house or double-wide punctuating the neighborhood. Evan half expected Beckett to roar through the early morning fog, just to make Evan earn his place at the crime scene, but the Wewahitchka police chief kept it under sixty for most of the trip. Evan was glad for the time. Aside from the fact that he dreaded working the scene of his own boss’s murder, the ride gave him a chance to drink his café con leche and smoke several cigarettes in quick succession.
The fog was retreating quickly from the rising sun. Pink gave way to a creamy yellow, which gave way to a radiant blue that was as hard and stark as it was beautiful.
About ten minutes outside of town, a low bridge broke the monotony of the woods. Beckett slowed as he reached it, then turned right onto a gravel road just over the other side. Evan rolled to a stop halfway across, intrigued by the surreal vista.
The flat expanse of water seemed to be stamped into the earth. Ancient cypress stumps, weathered to a stone gray, rose out of the lake’s mirror-smooth surface. The stumps and their reflections appeared to be suspended in the clear blue firmament, making Evan think of hundreds of dead, rising from watery graves. After a moment, he slid his foot onto the gas again and followed Beckett’s car. He found it parked in a clearing about a hundred yards back. It was one of several vehicles.
Evan parked behind Beckett as the other man got out of his car. Evan met him halfway.
“First time to the Dead Lakes, Sheriff?” Beckett asked.
“It is,” Evan affirmed.
“Well, as the new lawman in town, you’re going to want to familiarize yourself real quick. Folks get up to all sorts of shenanigans out here, now and again.”
Evan’s eyes narrowed at Beckett’s use of the word shenanigans. Beckett might be backwoods, but Evan was pretty sure he was no aw-shucks country boy.
He wondered if this was an act he played for everybody, or just people who needed to be jerked around.
The Chief nodded at Evan and started walking toward the center of the clearing. “Let me show you what you’ve got here.”
Two Wewa squad cars sat side by side about twenty-five feet away. Just behind them was a Sheriff’s Office cruiser. Another twenty-five feet beyond them was a pickup that Evan recognized as his boss’s. Two Wewa cops and a sergeant Evan recognized as Ruben Goff were huddled together not far from the truck.
Goff was holding a .22 rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Both hung at his sides. Several yards back from the truck, two civilians sat on the grass, looking up at another Wewa cop who was speaking to them in low tones.
As they approached the scene, Beckett continued, “This is a good place to meet up with folks you don’t want anyone knowing you met up with, if you catch my meaning. Only, Hutch’s meeting didn’t go so well for him. Looks like an execution to me. On his knees with a single large caliber bullet to the back of the head.”
“How much scene contamination?” Evan asked, pulling a pair of latex gloves from his pants pocket.
Beckett stopped at the yellow crime scene tape that encircled the truck and its immediate environs, and narrowed his eyes at Evan. “Just the two ol’ boys that found him. Might be one of them left a little puddle of vomit near your scene, but that’ll be all. They said they didn’t touch anything, and I made my observations from outside the perimeter.”
“You have any early guesses as to who he might have been meeting out here?” Evan asked.
“Could have been just about anybody, I suppose,” Beckett said. “He might even have interrupted someone else’s meeting, if drugs were changing hands, or if he rolled up on the wrong man copulating with the wrong woman. ’Bout the only thing I’d say for sure is your shooter is going to be a man.”
“What makes you say that?” Evan asked, as he stopped at the line of yellow tape.
“Court wouldn’t call it a fact, but looking at the damage, I’d say the shooter used a magnum, .357 or maybe even a .44. There’s a few women I know can handle a cannon like that, but it certainly wouldn’t be their weapon of choice, not for this kind of work.”
“You can tell the caliber used from outside the perimeter?” Evan asked.
“This ain’t my first homicide, Big Time,” Beckett said.
The other officers watched Evan warily as he and Beckett circled around the tape until Sheriff Hutchins’s body came into view.
The sheriff was on his knees, slumped against his open door, one hand in the cab, the other dangling. A swarm of red droplets spread across the window and door panel, the lower ones elongating into drips rather than drops. From beneath the sheriff’s face, where it rested against the door, ran a wide swath of blood. It had coagulated but not dried. The grass and sand around his knees was a darkening red. Evan had to agree with Beckett; no small automatic had done this.
“I’m going to wager it’ll be a closed casket,” Beckett said under his breath. “What do you think?”
Evan turned his gaze from the dead sheriff to the chief of police. “I think you seem a bit too chipper for the hour and circumstance.”
“You should have picked up a cup of coffee at the Shell,” Beckett said. “Nothing else the day throws at you will seem quite so bad by comparison.”
Evan stared at Beckett, letting his eyes convey his intense lack of amusement.
“Let me explain something to you, my bright new colleague,” Beckett said. “I didn’t have much affection for your boss. Even so, the killing of any law enforcement officer makes me sick. I’ll deal with this the same way I deal with any other unpleasant scene, which would be any way I see fit. I’d say you’ll deal with it however you, please, too.”
“Okay,” Evan said, which conveyed little and meant even less.
Beckett cleared his throat, and looked away. “Look, I never want to see a cop gunned down.” His eyes came back to meet Evan’s. “But as far as Sheriff “Randy” Randall Hutchins is concerned, there’s quite a few folks in Gulf County who won’t be mourning his passing. I happen to be one of them, but that doesn’t mean I won’t help you run his killer to ground.”
“Understood,” Evan said, more to end the conversation than for anything else.
Beckett stared over at the Sheriff’s body for a moment, and Evan wondered who would tell him why the bad blood between him and Beckett seemed to be personal.
“Hutchins and his wife live just about three miles from here, in the Wewa city limits,” Beckett said after a moment. “You want me to notify Marlene for you?” He tilted his head just a bit. “It might be better coming from someone she knows.”
Evan shook his head slightly. “Thank you, but I’ll do it. I’ll need to talk to her anyway.”
“Your show,” Beckett said. “Medical examiner should be here any minute, I reckon. Vi said she’d call your crime scene team as soon as she got off the phone with you. I’ll let you have my guys as long as you need them. Just make sure to sign for their hours so I’ll know how much to bill the Sheriff’s Office.” He took a hand out of his pocket to point across the grass. “That’s Pete Wilcox over there with your two witnesses. John Sharp’s the one talking to your guy. Should be just about everything you need from me.”
“If I can think of anything else I need from you, I’ll be sure to call,” Evan said, looking at Wilcox and the two coon hunters.
Beckett winked at him. “I’m sure you’ve got this in the bag, Big Time. I’ll be looking to see it solved by the evening news. So, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll leave you to it, maybe go get me a taste of Gina’s peach pie.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Evan said, “but I thought her name was Billie.”
“Billie’s at the Shell,” Beckett said, “Gina’s at the Chevron.”
“The gas stations around here serve a lot of pie,” Evan said as the man walked away. “Or is that a euphemism for something?”
Beckett looked over his shoulder and winked. “I don’t know. I’m gonna have to run home and look that word up.”
FOUR
RUBEN GOFF, THE OLDEST member of the Gulf County Sheriff’s Office, could have been described as scrawny, if he put on twenty pounds. Some of the other deputies called him Frost – though whether that was due to his temperament or his blue eyes and silver hair, Evan didn’t know. Local legend suggested Frost was lightning fast with a pistol, a skill that had come in handy more than once. Evan and he had probably exchanged fifty words in the several weeks that Evan had been with the SO.
Goff slipped up beside Evan, quiet as a rat pissing on cotton. They watched Beckett get into his car. “He’s only an ass ninety-percent of the time,” Goff said, his voice soft but resonant. “Wants you to think he’s Burt Reynolds. But he’s sly. Knows his trade and he knows the folks around here. You’ll want to take any help he offers.”
“Maybe I should appoint you as liaison,” Evan said.
Goff made a pfftt sound through his mustache, “I can’t stand the man.” He turned and walked alongside the crime scene tape to the back of the truck. “Something you need to see before the sun burns it away.”
Evan followed him under the tape. Goff hunkered on his heels behind the truck and Evan squatted down next to him. Goff leaned forward until his face was only inches from the ground. He turned his head sideways, looking under the truck. Evan watched, then did likewise.
“Do you see it?” Goff asked.
Evan saw nothing but sand and gravel and short grass.
“Folks coming and going from here, probably a hundred different sets of tire tracks on this little patch,” Goff said in his perpetually conversational murmur.
Then Evan saw what he was looking at, a variation in color among the dry nubs of grass, so slight as to be almost imperceptible except at this extreme angle.
“But there are only three sets,” Goff continued, “that disturbed last night’s dew.” Goff rose t
o his feet. “The sheriff’s truck, Mooney’s truck, back over yonder about fifty yards, and the truck that was parked right here.”
Goff walked about three paces to the passenger side of the sheriff’s truck and crouched down again. Evan joined him, following the line of his gaze. That slight variation of color showed again in the grass. The tracks pulled up right alongside Hutchins’s truck.
“Well, I’ll be...” Evan said. “That’s going to be our shooter’s truck.”
“Yep,” Goff said, “I reckon.”
The two men stood.
“Why didn’t they ever make you sheriff?” Evan asked
“Too many skeletons.”
“In your closet?”
Goff placed hands at the base of his spine and stretched. “Them. Plus the ones under my back porch.”
Before Evan could follow up on that, two additional Sheriff’s Office vehicles pulled up. Deputies Jimmy Crenshaw and Paula Trigg parked beside the two cruisers already blocking access to the scene, then jogged up the gravel road toward Evan.
Crenshaw had been employed as a deputy with Gulf County Sheriff’s Office for over three years. Evan had met him several times in the month he’d been with the Sheriff’s Office, but he hadn’t worked with him yet. Crenshaw was about thirty, and Evan had heard he’d done two tours in Afghanistan and then joined the sheriff’s office the minute he got back. With his hard physique and close-cut blond hair, he looked like he was still in the Army.
Paula Trigg was Gulf County’s crime scene investigator. She had come to the Sheriff’s Office after fifteen years as a Miami police officer. She didn’t talk about Miami much. Evan knew she and her K-9 partner had been involved in a shooting, an ambush apparently. They had both been shot, and the dog had lost a leg. The three Columbians who’d jumped them had not been wearing body armor, and thus none were arrested for the attack. The tiny little woman and her dog had taken them down.
Dead Reckoning Page 2
